When hotel group Starwood opens the first of its new concept aloft hotels in America next year, thousands of people will rightly claim to have already been inside.

Yet these people have never stepped across the hotel’s real threshold,merely walked into a virtual copy of the hotel that has been developed in the online alternate world Second Life.

Second Life, yet another web phenomenon du jour, is a three-dimensional graphical world in which virtual ‘residents’ live out alternative realities. Nearly 3 million people have become residents since the world was developed by Linden Labs in 2003, drawn by the appeal of living a fantasy life far removed from their own, perhaps as a prostitute offering virtual sex, poet, DJ, architect or property speculator.

The last of these categories gives another reason why people are drawn to the world – the chance of making money. Second Life has its own currency – the Linden dollar – which can be earned by selling virtual products or services. Currency exchanges have popped up, allowing Linden dollars to be exchange for real ones, and Linden Labs estimates that the Second Life economy is now worth a cool million US dollars a day. One property speculator – Second Life name Anshe Chung – is believed to be earning around US$150,000 a year, real dollars that is, from selling chunks of virtual real estate (if such a thing exists). Reuters recently announced it had a Second Life correspondent.

Once you have bought a suitable plot, you can build pretty much whatever you like, from hovels to hotels, using tools developed by other residents.

Starwood took the opening of its first aloft property seriously and held a launch party with pop star Ben Folds providing the music. Like all good parties, more people wanted to go than could get in – due to technical reasons in Second Life rather than your name not being on the guest list.

The virtual hotel has a serious purpose – to see how guests use it. Ross Klein, aloft’s president, says: “It gives us an opportunity to get behavioural indicators, even in a virtual space. The design and programming you see is very close to what we will be doing in the non-virtual world. We have moved things around and we have moved some programming in and out to see how the virtual inhabitants react to it. When we put a the fireplace in, it became the natural gathering place.”

Already, the real hotel’s design team has had ideas about putting trendy pool tables in the reception area and about etching a blueprint of the hotel floorplan onto the hotel floor, inspired by feedback from the virtual world.

Klein says the company’s decision to be in Second Life is not just trend-surfing hype. “We won’t pull out of Second Life. We will probably become transactional in the near future with some of our products. We will most likely have a Second Life rate as part of our pre-opening to thank those people to welcome them into our world.”  However, Klein is the first to admit that a virtual hotel can be very different from the real thing. “In Second Life, no-one sleeps or eats” he says.

Klein wouldn’t have a job in the real world if the same were true there.